Open ld-archer opened 1 year ago
Found independent association between loneliness, social isolation, and both Cardiovascular disease and type 2 Diabetes.
Meta analysis showing positive association between loneliness and increased risk of Dementia, as well as limited evidence suggesting a potential effect of loneliness on Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI).
"Cox proportional hazards regression indicated that loneliness was associated with a 40% increased risk of dementia. This association held controlling for social isolation, and clinical, behavioral, and genetic risk factors. The association was similar across gender, race, ethnicity, education, and genetic risk."
Study used data from the HRS.
Steptoe is a prolific author in this field and generally uses ELSA in his analyses. Finds differences between health links of loneliness and social isolation.
This study also found a significant link between both social isolation, loneliness, and mortality.
Need to find direct link in literature for the maybe pile. Slightly confusing as some papers say only social isolation has links to these things, some suggest both loneliness and social isolation have links. Also think about this for high cholesterol and hypertension, probably need to move into the maybe pile for loneliness (but not social isolation).
Full run complete and t-tests generated. Things to note:
Just found that in some cases, lnly
is being assigned a value of 0 (seen in the testing_crossvalidation.dta
testing dataset in analysis/techdoc_ELSA/
). This is obviously wrong so I need to figure out why and stop it happening. I'm confident this is happening during the running of the model because we don't have any 0 values in the input populations. Adding to the checklist at the top of this issue.
Lets look at the distribution of lnly in ELSA_long.dta
. tab lnly, m
Loneliness |
Score, Low |
to High [1, |
3] | Freq. Percent Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
1 | 47,627 47.85 47.85
2 | 19,518 19.61 67.46
3 | 3,050 3.06 70.52
. | 13,320 13.38 83.90
.c | 15,385 15.46 99.36
.m | 585 0.59 99.95
.r | 52 0.05 100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
Total | 99,537 100.00
. tab lnly male,column
+-------------------+
| Key |
|-------------------|
| frequency |
| column percentage |
+-------------------+
Loneliness |
Score, Low |
to High | Male
[1, 3] | 0 1 | Total
-----------+----------------------+----------
1 | 25,599 22,028 | 47,627
| 64.93 71.59 | 67.85
-----------+----------------------+----------
2 | 11,769 7,749 | 19,518
| 29.85 25.18 | 27.81
-----------+----------------------+----------
3 | 2,058 992 | 3,050
| 5.22 3.22 | 4.35
-----------+----------------------+----------
Total | 39,426 30,769 | 70,195
| 100.00 100.00 | 100.00
Looks like women are slightly more likely to score higher on the loneliness scale, however the vast majority of people rank their loneliness as low.
. tab lnly educ, column
+-------------------+
| Key |
|-------------------|
| frequency |
| column percentage |
+-------------------+
Loneliness |
Score, Low |
to High | Harmonised Education Level
[1, 3] | 1.Less th 2.Upper S 3.Tertiar | Total
-----------+---------------------------------+----------
1 | 12,562 22,472 8,702 | 43,736
| 61.79 69.79 74.10 | 68.05
-----------+---------------------------------+----------
2 | 6,454 8,515 2,772 | 17,741
| 31.75 26.44 23.61 | 27.60
-----------+---------------------------------+----------
3 | 1,314 1,213 269 | 2,796
| 6.46 3.77 2.29 | 4.35
-----------+---------------------------------+----------
Total | 20,330 32,200 11,743 | 64,273
| 100.00 100.00 100.00 | 100.00
People with a lower education level are more likely to have a high loneliness score (3). Probably what we would have expected, but the same is not true for social isolation, which is pretty interesting.
The accepted metric for loneliness seems to be the revised UCLA scale for loneliness (wiki link to original here). The revised scale was originally published by Russell et al (1980) and is scored as follows:![Revised UCLA loneliness scale](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/44437206/201054897-1af5e6cc-fd58-49c9-95de-ddab411f7d41.png)
This scale has then been applied to the HRS and ELSA by selecting 3 questions that are available in the surveys:
r*complac
- How often R feels lack of companionshipr*leftout
- How often R feels left outr*isolate
- How often R feels isolated from othersHughes et al. (2004) applied this scale to the HRS and provided evidence for its efficacy, and Shankar et al. (2011) applied the same revised scaled to ELSA.
Each question is answered as ['1 - Hardly ever of never', '2 - Some of the time', '3 - Often'], which is then combined into a summary score from 3-9, with higher scores indicating greater loneliness. It's not completely clear from the paper whether Shankar et al. used the mean score of the three questions (which then means we could use the summary variable
r*lnlys3
) or the sum of each variable, as they mention both in the methods section. The summary score does seem to have some advantages as it handles some of the missing values (i.e. if respondent has 1 or 2 missing, they still have a score), so I'm leaning towards that right now.ToDo:
atotb
value as predictor for now but come back to itlnly
variable is being assigned a value of 0 whilst running the modeladlstat
orexstat
as I don't think these have the same issue